Paris-based software company famous for its optical research, testing systems and software. It publishes DxO PhotoLab (previously known as DxO Optics Pro), FilmPack and ViewPoint, the Nik Collection and the PureRAW RAW pre-processing tool.
You can make basic tonal adjustments with levels and more sophisticated modifications with curves, but the Tonal Contrast filter in DxO Color Efex Pro goes a whole step further. The problem with curves adjustments is that any change you make in one area of the image curve has a knock-on effect on the rest. If…
Nik Software must have discovered some unknown digital alchemy when it developed Silver Efex Pro. Suddenly, here was a digital imaging tool that really could replicate the look, feel and even the ‘soul’ of silver-based black and white. And one of the favourite tools of traditional black and white photographers was the ‘contrast’ filter. These…
Color Efex Pro 4 doesn’t just boast a huge list of great filter effects, it also lets you ‘stack’ them in combination and then save your own, unique style as a ‘Recipe’. Nik Software really pulled out all the stops with Color Efex Pro 4. There were many useful additions and tweaks to the filters,…
Fine art can mean a whole lot of different things, but here I’m just going to show how to turn a colour image into a simple graphic composition that could work quite nicely when you hang it on your wall. There are two things you need in order for this to work. One is an…
There are so many filters in Color Efex Pro that it can take a long, long time to work out all the things that it can do. Some of the tools are obvious, like Levels and Curves or Graduated Filters, but some are less so, and the Detail Extractor is a prime example. It sounds…
Anyone who used to shoot with black and white film will have a favourite, and I always had a soft spot for Kodak Tri-X. I didn’t mind the grain because I liked that gritty, ‘documentary’ feel, and sometimes I push-processed during development to get a little more contrast, especially in the depths of the Northern…
DxO Color Efex Pro 4 isn’t just a collection of special effects. It also has a number of powerful image-editing tools hidden amongst them, and one of these is the Levels & Curves tool. You can use this to make adjustments to your images in the same way you would in Photoshop, Elements and other…
Burning in the edges of your pictures is a great way to enhance the composition because it improves the picture’s overall contrast and helps you concentrate attention on the picture’s focal point. The point is that converting your pictures to black and white is just the start, and ‘digital’ techniques like channel mixing are useful…
If you look at any old Hollywood film you’d see they had a standard technique for creating ‘moonlight’. They’d simply shoot in bright sunlight, reduce the exposure and give the picture a blue tinge. The bizarre thing was that it worked – it did give the appearance of ‘night’. Moonlight isn’t actually blue, though. If…
Color Efex Pro 4 (part of the DxO Nik Collection) doesn’t just apply individual filters – you can also combine, or ‘stack’ filters to create a cumulative effect. I’ve used it here to add a warm, dreamy glow to this minimalist landscape in order to show how this stacking system works. The start shot is…